Sometimes teaching science is like teaching music. More specifically teaching piano.

A teacher can sit down and play a lovely piece and then tell the student that they too can learn to play the same piece.

Now the teacher has two options. They can teach the student to read the notes and play the scales and with time the student will in fact be able to play the lovely piece as well as many other pieces because they can read music and understand a little music theory. They have learned to play the piano.

Another method that can be used is faster. In schools it is sometimes called teaching to the test. The teacher plays a lovely piece and tells the student that they too can learn to play the same piece. Then the teacher teaches them to do the fingering for that piece. The student doesn’t learn to read music, knows no music theory, but they can finger out the one piece. This student can’t play the piano.

Unfortunately in many schools science is being taught using the latter method. The teacher lectures about a topic and /or the students read about the topic but they don’t interact with the topic. They learn vocabulary for the test without learning the concepts or applications.

Roseanne W. Fortner from Project JASON put it nicely when she said,
“Text teaching is easy, organized, and disciplined, with the predictable results of boredom and test anxiety. Teaching with hands-on activities is demanding, hectic, noisy, and sometimes unpredictable, but everyone is involved, eager, and active, and participants remember what they have done. Activities energize, localize and dramatize science. I have never seen a textbook do that.”

“Seen only as a laundry list of theorems in a workbook, science can be a bore. But as a ‘hand-on’ adventure guided by a knowledgeable teacher, it can sweep children up in the excitement of discovery.”
~ William J. Bennett as US Secretary of Education, 1986

The teacher’s job is not to transfer information; rather it is to be a coach for creative and critical thinking. Roll up your sleeves, dig in, get your hands dirty and allow your child like curiosity to support your wonder. Become a facilitator and let the students explore for themselves.